Well, least I could do, right ? :-)

Thanks for the tips on pacmd. Of course I'm going to investigate pulseaudio (although you claim to know nothing about it, I know even less :-) and report back on how it goes...

BTW, do you know what the last (percent) value on the mplayer console status line means ?
From the docs it could be the audio CPU usage, but I'm not sure.
On my N900 it shows about 20% while playing an MP3 file, and much lower for FLAC (around 3%, never reaching 5). Also, the CPU meter bar (in the Hildon status bar) never moves while decoding Flac, while it sometimes jumps up & down with mp3.

EDIT - PS: that workaround for pacmd is not working as-is... I get : "Daemon not responding"...